skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry for not being clear; I was talking about the abolition of slavery and the height of the civil rights movement, which occurred long before I was born. I agree that it's pretty ludicrous today to have a discussion about why different races deserve equal rights under the law. But you're treating universal healthcare as being on the same level in terms being a settled issue, and it's not.

I find it incredibly offensive that you equate someone believing that non-universal healthcare might be better economically for larger groups of people to someone thinking that enslaving black people is ok. Actually, I find it almost impossible to believe that you think they're equal. Do you seriously not recognize that there is substantial debate in the field of economics about this?

Mostly I just find it disappointing that you apparently can't do anything in defense of your ideas other than sling mud, because you lack either the ability or the inclination. You claim it's the latter; I'm happy to take you at your word, but I'd still prefer you not do it here.
There's plenty of tech talk in #startups too. It's also more informal, ruder at times, and altogether a wilder and less-tamed corner of the internet.

Naturally, it is in no way "official" or associated with YCombinator in any way shape or form.
I haven't had kids of my own but I hope to take up all this advice some day. Being an entrepreneur and a father is not easy but one should strive to strike a balance. Good article.
The Ridiculously Frightening World of Japanese Spooks
Wrong, it was flagged and removed almost immediately. And judging by the downvotes, your immature comments aren't terribly welcome either.
I think she means she uses PPC to generate traffic for her business, not that PPC is her business.
More people should write
It's depressing because to a typical cynical programmer (and we're prone to be cynics spending our time looking for bugs) selling anything has a coat of slime on it. Marketing is mostly about deception and half-truths, and promoting a product effectively means maximizing the positives and minimizing/omitting the negatives:
"Look at this shiny car!" (engine leaks oil)
"Buy our shiny lightweight computer!" (can't change battery)
etc...

Good programming is the search for The Right Way to solve a particular problem, Truth if you will. Marketing and sales seem to be about un-Truth. It is little wonder that there are so many programmers who look at sales/marketing with disdain.
I've been rumaging over this same thought myself and I think there's a real key point here that is sort of distinguished between in the article, mainly it boils down to just knowing your audience, but on a broader level I think its this: are you developing a web app or a website? For me, if I'm building an app I've also gotten to the point where I just ignore IE completely, mainly for reasons stated in the article (writing tons of work arounds that convolute the codebase, absolute lack of support for MANY features, etc). Also I think in most cases( it does depend) for most apps and their audience, very few are going to be using IE, so I don't really care about losing that 1% of my target group, especially if it helps me build a better app. For websites, sadly, the story is in most cases different and the majority of users will come from some version of IE. (Although, personally I've notice this changing a lot in the last year for my sites, we've been getting huge spikes in mobile - which yes, means no IE, so I think unless microsoft does something to take over mobile in 5 years devs aren't gonna have to worry about it.
Hopefully this will settle down soon - currently seems to be overrun by trolls.

I think only allowing registered nicks would be a very good idea.
That is an old meaning, which is slowly falling out of favor - it's very common to mean "8 bits" when you say byte.

Per Wikipedia - "The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. The de facto standard of eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte. With ISO/IEC 80000-13, this common meaning was codified in a formal standard. Many types of applications use variables representable in eight or fewer bits, and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures have aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit size.[3]

The term octet was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of 8 bits because of the ambiguity associated at the time with the term byte."
nice movie
http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/09/the-raven-2012-full-hd-mo...
Ruby and Python are Ready on Codecademy
Nah, it's just sarcastic humor.
I'm specifically looking at getting into product development. Any suggested reading material for me?
A Real Ruby 1.8.7 → 1.9.3 Migration
Quantum Computing wins a Nobel
True. There is nothing wrong with git. It is great software.

But like a good song, if the radio stations overplay it, they can ruin the enjoyment of it for some listeners.

I think maybe we (nerds) all have the urge to be fanboys. We all have some software that we really like. Yet there are many examples of people who resist the urge to be a fanboy. Alas, the ones who give in to it are the ones who post their follies on the web and announce it to the world. The ones who don't are silent.
Do you have any tips from the last third of the talk that you needed to skip?
>But I never trust Intel's marketing anyway because they always seem to exaggerate in some way or be misleading on purpose, so we'll see how that goes.

I think you can safely remove "Intel's" from that sentence and it remains as accurate, or perhaps more so. I really don't mean to hate on marketing, but their job is to sell a story. Good marketers walk that fine line between outright lying and carefully walking the "happy path" that makes whatever they are selling the cure for what ails you and fails to mention the problems. In general once you dig into things you almost always start finding the trade-offs/drawbacks that marketing "forgot" to mention. Thomas Sowell was right when he said: "There are no solutions ... only trade offs".
Yes, I think you're right. Still inane but that explains most of the comments I listed here.
Except he is already a beast at java.
Interesting framework demo example, so true...
Your point is not complicated, but on the other hand you didn't actually make it until now. You relied on me understanding that you consider you consider judgement-by-Github to be equivalent to judgement-by-terminology. But honestly: how was I to know that "hey yer Github sucks" was actually an exemplification of what the next sentence in your post said not to do, and not just an ordinary internet insult?

Nota bene: I actually agree with you.
Smart idea but some of the exiting note sharing platforms have been heading this way too. Interesting to see if an indiegogo funded startup can keep up.
most people do not have the kind of talent for writing that you and patio11 possess

Maybe most people don't, but many (maybe most) here on HN do. Just look at the comments here.

And even if you don't have the writing skills on day 1, you can improve via advice, feedback, various courses and books, and practice.
Selling products to people who have subscribed to an email list may be a great way to get customers. But part of the secret sauce is getting people to be on your list in the first place. I was hoping the article would touch on that a bit more.

Where do you find people who are potential customers who willingly want you to market to them? If I could master that, the sky is the limit.
It would have disadvantages from the point of view of rapid development though, especially considering his team are going to be much more experienced in Java now.

Would be interesting to know if he is using Scala for any parts of it though.
Reasons not to buy from Amazon
The author failed to answer an very important question about RST: is it revenue-neutral? By which I mean, does the government receive equal revenue under RST as under the complex system it replaces?

The "revenue neutral" question is very important -- it frequently makes or breaks tax reform measures, on the ground that anything but revenue neutrality hands a reform measure's opponents an easy basis for criticism.

Revenue neutrality, if true, would greatly increases the practical value of RST. By contrast, if taxpayers pay half the old rates, but the government receives half the revenue, the system seems less a reform than a gimmick.
When I decided to switch from an iPhone 3GS to an Android, I just went to the first store I saw and bought one. That was over a year ago. No preorder necessary.

It's a first gen Galaxy S, it did came with some bloatware on it. Never bothered me though, plus because it's an Android I was able to install Android 4 on it, even though Samsung doesn't support it.

I would love offline maps, but I also cannot give up GMaps.
https://code.google.com/p/j2objc/ or something similar could help them avoid a (manual) rewrite.
"As an example, after university I discovered that when I'd been struggling alone to do my assignments and assuming all the guys were just finding it easy, all the guys were going round to each other's rooms, hanging out together, discussing work and looking at each other's code. They didn't think to invite me, possibly out of fear that I'd misinterpret it as a date or that I'd ruin the boys' club atmosphere, and I rarely asked them about work for fear of looking like I wasn't up to their level." - this x1000. It doesn't help when you're attending a super competitive CS program with a bunch of people who seem (or give the appearance of) knowing everything. I'm not saying they really could have done anything about it, or it's anyone's fault I felt excluded. In fact, it was entirely my fault I did all my group assignments alone; had I overcome my introversion, I have no doubt I would have gotten friendly responses. However, I think CS is going to be attractive for a higher proportion of introverted people than not. How do we make those environments friendlier to sensitive outsiders like this? It's not an easy problem to solve.
IME, the 1995 era thinking is still alive and well and not even just in little niches. Certainly we've made progress in that at least now there is a debate as to whether 40 hour weeks are better than 80 or 120 hour weeks, but I wouldn't go so far as to suggest it is conventional wisdom.
You guys are so cool.
While I appreciate the story, what's wrong with `ls -lh`?
The video reminds me of System shock 2 somehow. I guess an eerie empty spaceship with what look now like quite dated graphics.

Looks like there is some sort of FPS aspect to this, hopefully you can catch ships in tractor beams and then board them, merging both ships together into some kind of CTF map. That could be fun.

The Singleplayer/Multiplayer/Hyperplayer looks interesting too, it could be a totally different game playing a few people on a LAN vs the MMO version.
FYI, to both you and shinratdr, the word is jibe. It jibes extremely well with a lot of traditional business management. Jive is a dance and a manner of speaking.
"It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing."
I find this outlook really sad. I paid $39 for Brennan's ebook (thanks to a $10 off coupon) and I didn't know him from Adam when I bought it. Literally don't think I had ever heard of him, but someone on HN recommended it. I read the whole thing in one sitting and the very next day, sent out two project proposals at a 50% bump in my normal hourly rates. One guy balked, one guy just said ok without comment. That simple bump represented an extra $10k in revenue for me, or 250x the cost of the ebook. All because I bothered to read a book and make a minimal effort to apply the principles.

Not everyone who buys the book is going to get that much out of it, or even get anything out of it at all. But to call it a scam simply because it's information that is being sold under the premise that it can help you improve if you apply it?

That's pretty sad.

EDIT: I should also mention that this was only a couple weeks ago, so the guy who balked might still come back. That's not uncommon in my experience. Regardless, I'm after great rates, not just total revenue.
Yeah, you are right. It could be in frequencies we cannot observe with the naked eye, but eventually, we would have to tweak some other postulates, too. Let's start over and postulate a gigantic turtle that carries the world…
The idea is cool but the execution is even better. From what I saw the prototype itself is pretty awesome. Can't wait for a complete product.
No. This argument has been dismantled so many times by so many (yes, often "feminist") scholars ... it pains me a little to recapitulate.

Gender is a construct. It is /tethered/, but not mapped, to sex. They are in no way identical, and often, in so many ways, orthogonal. Sex (ie, sex difference) has a finite number of dimensions, and the ones we can identify with confidence are physiological (currently, we understand neither the connection between neural function and behavior, nor the mechanics of culture, in enough detail enough to draw clear conclusions about what might really be "male" vs "female" characteristics in the realm of culture or behavior). Gender, OTOH, has unlimited, fluid dimensions. The prospect of discovering or creating a simple mapping between sex and gender, begets a vain project. [Similar to the project of mapping Jewishness to thrift, ethnicity to ability, sexual orientation to morality, etc.]

Moreover, the process of peeling away the layers of what may be constructed / learned, or may be more-or-less dictated by genetics -- to varying degrees depending on an individual and a set of circumstance -- is /exactly/ the process of dismantling gender, which we can also hope will lead to a more equitable distribution of power.

So if one is sincerely curious about the underlying realities, keeping at chipping away the presumptions, is the way to go.
The rewrite maybe isn't such a big deal. Just find a good freelance iOS developer and throw some money and the Java codebase at them.

With the depth of this game and the FPS type elements though I'm skeptical whether it will make a good iPhone game or not though.
Or, you could use 'ls -h'...

(that said, I do see the utility, since it gives a more obvious visual queue as to the order of size differences... but if you're doing anything with the sizes programatically, you have to remove the commas afterwards... Short version: if you're going to do this, make it a unique flag, or a new flag modifier to the -l flag... don't overload the -l flag without recourse...)
> given that Dropbox has native version control (via its web interface)

I'm guessing you've never had to do a large restore from Dropbox before? It's technically possible, but on a file-by-file basis. Delete a folder of 1000 photos? You've got 1000 restores to do.

A competent restore system has been begged for by the users for years:

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2215/restore-to-a-specific-e...
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/3930/restore-any-folder-to-s...

Frankly, it's almost sad that Dropbox's restore feature is so bad that people are able to make entire products based around making a good version of it.
We implement ADD, CDD, CYAE extensively in our company ..
The Keep
Nope, I like sharing (and, confession: it gets me incidental business. Win-win all around.)

My mailing list initially came from Planscope subscribers. You'll notice I have a "get 8 free reports" opt-in on the blog and when you sign up for a trial. That is rehashing the BEST email reports I've ever sent using an autoresponder. My general freelancer mailing list (non-Planscope specific) is people who came over via Planscope or the book.

Here's an example: http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=ac67336d11c5d745a54e0867...
> Alternatively, most of the stars really far away could be covered in a Dyson sphere.

The principle of energy conservation dictates that all the energy inside the sphere gets out, in one form or another. So the existence of Dyson spheres, dust clouds, dark matter etc. only delays the appearance of the energy in the universe at large.
Brennan, serious question here.

What have you done and how long have you been doing it for to come along and offer advice which you are now selling to others?

Checking the registration dates of your three domains I find the following:

planscope.io - April 4, 2012

businessoffreelancing.com - Sept 19, 2012

doubleyourfreelancingrate.com - Aug 15, 2012

wearetitans.net (2008) (where you work?) doesn't have an about page so I can find out nothing about your past history or your role there.

This is your twitter:

https://twitter.com/brennandunn

Your HN profile shows very little and so does a search.

So tell me a little more about why your advice is so valuable.
Sir, you have confused a term. /Consent/ is the opposite. Look it up.
Whats wrong with Google docs?
If Nokia would have invested in MeeGo, it would have been more than ready. It still is more of a smartphone than WP 7.x is and ever will be.

I kept an open mind so far, but I'm starting to think that WP was a huge mistake...
Kickstarter is also a pre-order system.

People who donate to kickstarter will do so at least partly to get a copy of whatever at a (possibly) reduced cost.

The costs of kickstarter pre-orders are also partly dictated by the market value of other similar products, $20 for an indie game or whatever.

Under this system that incentive goes away since there will be no personal advantage in making the lower end pledges especially since the perceived cost is now free.

I'm sure someone will jump on and say "but I will do it just to support the project!" , congratulations but you are probably in a minority.
Entrepreneurial Student? studentUpstarts invests in student teams. Get involved
Why? Because we believe that students will create the best companies for the future - be your own boss and do it right now.<p>What? Come and find out about Student Upstarts - we invest up to £15,000 plus time and advice into student-led teams so they can start and grow their own business.<p>Where? Marlborough Arms, 36 Torrington Place, London. WC1E 7LY. Map URL.<p>The format:
- Chat to Christian and Matthew, the co-founders of Student Upstarts about what makes an investable business and the Student Upstarts plans for the rest of 2012.
- Join fellow entrepreneurial students who are interested in starting their own company to discuss ideas, teammates, tech and business.
- Students from the teams we've backed so far will be there to answer any questions too.
- What's included: a couple of beers and good conversations.
"Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg available." That quotation from the article reveals some kind of double standard.
Before planscope it was projectorpm.com, cease-and-desist copyright issue. The book and podcast are relatively new.

I'm the owner of We Are Titans, my consultancy, and it's been around since 2008. Before that, I was just a freelancer.

Also, http://hamptonroads.com/2011/11/small-tech-we-are-titans-off...

Lastly, I'm not trying to say I'm some uber consultant extraordinaire. But I know what's worked for me, and have had a serious amount of positive reception (success stories) from my book. I think that's what matters most.
Sacrificing abstractions is quite common in all languages when optimizing code.
"Ok yolo"
If everyone in the US was a murderer, it hopefully still wouldn't make murder a positive thing. Same for privacy violations and restrictions on freedom.
I couldn't disagree more. This is such a defeatist attitude. Nothing separates what Bdunn or patio11 are doing from doable, teachable possibilities for others.

I, along with countless others in this community, am building a SaaS product that will create value for others, and will generate wealth for my team. No scam. No sleaze.

Concepts and products like bdunn's offer immense value for other creators and entrepreneurs like me, and we pay them for it. No scam. No sleaze. No victims.

Sometimes it's easier for nay-Sayers to reject an option as impossible and scammy than to admit they're too lazy, too scared, or whatever else. Sometimes they geniunely just can't see it. Either way, it's unfortunate.
The world is upside down when college-educated white and Asian males making $60k+ a year ($40 an hour programmers) are "the weak", isn't it? I just have to put that out there.

Vis-a-vis businesses it can actually make sense, because any business which is e.g. hiring an intermediate Ruby developer for $40 an hour is exploiting him, but "Five figures a month is unachievably high! There are no reliable ways of earning that! (+) The people who tell you otherwise are exceptions! You are an effing commodity who is indistinguishable from a $5 an hour code monkey in a low-wage country! Do not aspire above your station! Play your part!" is not advice which has his best interests at heart.

+ Freelance Rails developers can put out a shingle and get $100 an hour, which trivially gets them to $10k a month even at about 70% utilization. The interesting business problems are in getting from $10k to $20k and then points beyond. Advice which meaningfully accelerates that is worth what the sophisticated, rabidly skeptical, too-smart-to-realize-when-they're-being-stupid developer community will pay for it.
"It's like condemning all..."

No, it is not like that. I'm not sure why you would see it that way. It is condemning a very specific practice. This practice is much like multi-level marketing.

You might think of it as a sort of recursion. To use your example, it would be like selling a book on how to sell a book on how to learn to program. You might do very well with this sort of business but it does not require that anyone ever learns how to program. That is, the book does not need to be effective in accomplishing anything more than selling itself. As long as you understand this, it's fine. But somewhere down the line, someone may actually want to learn to program (not just sell ebooks). If this still isn't clear I am happy to give another example.

Do some Google searches for "how to become wealthy without...", "work from home..." or some similarly popular too-good-to-be-true idea, or even just "internet marketing". You will find eventually examples of people, who have (surprise) done very well for themselves, by selling advice on how to sell advice on how to {become wealthy, work from home, etc.}, using the internet (email, web). These "advice on how to sell advice" schemes are perhaps the most lucrative forms of advice that can be sold via the internet. And also the most hollow. A best selling ebook might simply be a ebook on how to sell ebooks (on how to sell ebooks)! Keep recursing.

Or just cut to the chase and search "multi-level marketing".
The Triptych Enigma
That's probably worth emphasizing more: this post is pretty old.
yeah, i thought "NLTK is lame" was hilarious. it's that kind of biting, subversive sarcasm that we need more of. maybe it could be made into a light night show. cult following - attract the thought leaders with a wry edge. that kind of thing.
Here's where the analogy falls apart - civil engineering does not provide for coordinated efforts among thousands of construction workers. Construction management does. Any large building project will involve a civil or structural engineering firm, which designs the building or structure, and a construction firm, which builds it.

The construction firm is your compiler toolchain. The benchmark to meet is how long it took to design the Empire State Building, not how long it took to put it together.
I made a MVC library called Stapes that hopefully fills in this space:

http://hay.github.com/stapes/

It's on TodoMVC as well in the labs section:

http://todomvc.com/labs/architecture-examples/stapes/

About 500 LOC, only the important parts you need in a MVC library (a flexible event system and models with change events), nothing else.

Have a look and tell me what you think :)